Web Architectural-Inducing Model (WA-IM) for Information Architecture in cultural context: An empirical investigation

Website Information Architecture (IA) is primarily treated as a new discipline that is concerned with design principles and architecture of information in digital landscape. Proliferation of revolutionary models for interdisciplinary applications of IA, however lack theoretical perspectives, empirical evidence and cultural context. Here, we proposed a new model called Web Architectural-Inducing Model (WA-IM). The model was developed based from existing literature and available architectural proposition from prior work. We tested the model suggesting that website IA being conceptualized as multidimensional constructs by exploring the applicability of WA-IM to web localization process from a socio-cognitive cultural perspective. The research methodology involves a web-based survey on Muslim online user as the cultural case study where 427 usable international responses were accumulated. The construct validation of the multifactor structure of website IA was assessed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) by using structural equation modeling. AMOS 7.0 was used to evaluate the five factor hypothesis goodness fit model. The result revealed that website IA is indeed a multidimensional construct composed of five factors: content-information, content-trust, navigation-traits, navigation-wayfindings and context. We conclude our study by providing empirical evidence for WA-IM in a form of goodness-fit-structure as part of the localization process towards the creation of cultural information structure.